The Difference Between Entitlement, and Knowing your Worth

It's a good question San Rand who works in PR/social media raised on LinkedIn#. Self confidence can be a struggle for some people. Experience helps figure out some of those boundaries, but we're often called to doing something original as creators, innovative in business.

By definition innovative is about new and different. Worth is a a combination of what you value and what has value for others. In commercial terms, what they would pay for it. How we measure and reward value is shifting considerably.

Think for example of someone working in a corporate job — they're used to thinking in terms of salary and benefits, even as they need to provide evidence of return on investment for their work. It's more fluid when consulting or free lancing. You can figure out going rates and create demand for how you deliver.

The reason why confidence is such an important piece of the value puzzle, is that we're not as independent as we'd like to think. To function — to create and to sell anything — we need others.

Difference between entitlement and knowing your worth

Entitlement is an expectation and a belief. For example, we expect that nature exists to serve us. So it's an expectation of given priority, that the world adapts to you and your way of thinking. This belief overwhelms the ability to see the impact and consequences of our actions.

The truth is nobody owes us nothing.

Knowing your worth belongs to the realm of choice, something you work on achieving. It also involves belief, but also action — and a willingness to use feedback and evidence as grounding factors. Sometimes that also means making do until you figure out a way to align perception with reality.

For example, if you know your experience can accelerate solving a specific problem but the other party doesn't, then you shift to educating them on the nature of the problem, rather than trying to sell a service they may not appreciate yet.

Lack of appreciation and withholding characterize entitlement, focus on appreciation and investment are at the center of knowing value. Evidence helps with confidence as you earn worth. Follow the problem you solve, ignore what everyone else is doing.

Something I found helpful is to suspend judgement in negotiating the worth of a project. A business may have tight constraints or use a different baseline to evaluate worth. We do get what we pay for — and also, we don't get what we're unable/unwilling to go for. It's just what it is.

This frees energy and mental focus to find more effective ways to solve the actual problem. Depth wins over volume in the long run.